Wednesday, May 08, 2013

The whole society deal

An old post - but one I am putting up as a squint eyed comment concerning the controversy concerning Vivek Chibber's recent book on Marxism and post-colonial studies.

In Ma Nuit chez Maud, Jean-Louis, the Catholic
engineer, bumps into an old college friend of his, Vidal, who is now a
philosophy professor. Jean-Louis confesses that he is still an observing
Catholic; but, he says, he has his own ideas about Catholicism. For instance,
he recently read Pascal and felt that if Pascal’s rigorism was Christianity, he
would rather be an atheist. Vidal, on the other hand, claims that, as a
Marxist,Pascal has a peculiar meaning
to him.His choice of Marxism, he
claims, was decided by something like Pascal’s wager about the existence of
God. As Vidal sees it, there are two ways of looking at history. Either it
doesn’t make sense or it does. If the first view, A, has an 80 percent sense of
being true, and the second a 20 percent chance, it is still rational to bet on
the second view – as it fills one’s life with meaning.

I doubt that there are many Marxists today who would say,
with Vidal, that Marxism is a decision to see the meaning in history. They are
far more likely to explain that Marxism points to the way in which the meaning
of history changes with the historical circumstances of the interpreters –
which tends to undermine any objective claim to discern the meaning of history.
And, to an extent, I would agree with the disabused Marxist. It is true that
Vidal is reflecting a position that was most pronounced in the years after WWII,
when the defeat of Nazi Germany and decolonization could easily make a person
think that history was ‘on our side’ – although of course the sense of history
could be an infinite crucifixion, a la de Maistre. By the sixties, however, the
notion that there was some inevitable development in history – inevitability
being one way to construe the ‘meaning’ of history – was on the wane. This
version of history had always competed with a positivist variant – that the
progress of science was, in general, the progress of liberal capitalist
society. In the late 80s and 90s, the notion that history made sense was
disguised in the end of history thesis.

Marx had a strong sense of history. This, it is usually
said, is his inheritance from Hegel; however, even a glance at the
Enlightenment and Romantic culture of Germany would show us that history as a
“force” of some kind precedes Hegel. Herder, the translators of the Scots like
Gentz, romantic critics like Schlegel were very invested in seeing history as a
force. In one way, this expressed a clear material anguish: the peasant society
of the limited good was particularly strong in the German states, and the distrust
of growth was shared by peasants and Juunkers. Faith in history as a force was
the face of the modernity longed for by a section of the intelligentsia.

Marx’s original views about history were, I think, entangled
with his sense of Germany’s underdevelopment. The double aspect of Marx’s
description of the capitalist system – on the one hand, as the expression of
the revolutionary force of the bourgeoisie, and, on the other hand, as a system
that had to be overthrown – lead to a certain confusion in reading Marx
chronologically. That double aspect allows Marx a lot of irony elbow room – and
Marx always viewed irony as a high intellectual gift.

It is in the Manifesto that Marx makes certain statements
about history that, themselves, have a history leading up to the conversation
of Jean-Louis and Vidal in Ma Nuit chez Maud. As with Baudelaire’s
notion of the modern, history is obviously a bit of an intoxicant to Marx. And
why not? Who has not known the sublime feeling of standing with the devil above
it all, at say 6,000 feet above all human kind– although it is best not to bow down to the devil at that moment, no
matter what he promises you.

“One speaks of ideas, which revolutionize a whole society;
one thus only expresses the fact, that within the old society have been moulded
the elements of a new one, for the dissoluton of the old ideas keeps pace with
the dissolution of the old relations of life.”

The uncompromising phrase, a “whole society,” seems to infer
a unilateral motion, pressing on all levels of society.Everything goes at once, for all pieces of
the old relations of life are connected to each other. And we do see this. Who
can’t see, for instance, that the old ways of human locomotion – mainly by walking,
sometimes by horse – were so completely swept away, first by the railroad, then
by the automobile, that walking in many places in the developed world – for
instance, Texas – has become a minority option.The old times – the week it would take to go from London to Edinburgh –
have disappeared – or exist only in the minds and careers of bums and tramps.
But bums and tramps can’t simply walk across the countryside like they could in
1900 or 1800 – they are bounded by the roads they can travel, as they cannot
walk besides a highway, and would certainly draw police attention if they walk
along other roads. At the present time, China, in one of the greatest
engineering feats ever attempted, is automobilizing its human locomotion. All
over the world, the car is uprooting and changingthe old relations of life.

And yet, is it true that the surface of life is so
homogeneous that it can simply change like this?

That question gets to another aspect of Marx’s ironic praise
of the bourgeoisie: that homogeneity is the result of capitalism. The homogeneous
society, in which the archaic has no place to hide, is the effect of the
penetrative tendency of capitalist culture, which roots out its opponents from
the intimate sphere. Of course, its opponents might produce the elbow room that
makes capitalism tolerable – and capitalist overreach might well be keyed to
the sound of a gravedigger digging his own grave, which is what Marx heard. We
at this point give capitalism much more time than Marx could give it in the
nineteenth century, and we can watch the process of total change. Ethan
Watters, a journalist, has pointed out
that the variegated understanding of emotions in different cultures are in the
process of being changed, or at least confronted, by an American model that is
convenient to Big Pharma. This is from a NYT magazine article he wrote on the
subject:

“We have for many years been
busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of
mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way
the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a
loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming
against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental
illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural
histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence
suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over
(either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the
ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men
have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage
followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer fromkoro,
which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are
retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East
there iszar, a
condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative
episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.”

No matter – all madnesses must get in line! Or so it would
seem as the Blue Pill bears down. The marketing of mood management is by now a
well known ongoing scandal – one that has produced almost no opposition.
Whenever marketers change the laws to allow for the mass advertising, over tv,
of various anti-depressives, the amount of anti-depressives goes up far, far
over anybody’s estimate of the real number of pathological depressives, which
then enters into the ordinary life of the emotions and our expectations of
people’s moods. And so it goes – what, in an earlier age, would be considered
an illness in itself, can now be dismissed as a side affect and become the
locus of a new marketing campaign and a new drug. Here, the homogenization
promised by the term‘whole society”
seems armed and should be considered dangerous.

And so, I’d contend, Marx began to think in the years after
the Commune.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.